This Is Nothing To Brag About | Judge Yourself Not Others

Oh, you’ve read the works of Heidegger? You finished all of Infinite Jest? You made it through all of Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning, all of Faulkner’s lesser works, Finnegan’s Wake and Ulysses? You must be pretty proud of yourself.✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:39Ryan Holiday?

  This is nothing to brag about.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, you've read the works of Heidegger? Oh, you finished all of Infinite Jest? You made it through Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning, all of Faulkner's lesser works, Finnegan's Wake, and Ulysses? You must be pretty proud of yourself. Epictetus once spoke with a student who was pretty proud of themselves for the same reasons. They had managed to make their way through a particularly dense work by the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. They expected Epictetus to be proud. Instead, he looked at them and said, "You know, if Chrysippus had been a better writer, you'd have less to brag about." And this is an important Stoic lesson for two reasons. One, it reminds us that the Stoics valued clear, straightforward writing and thinking. It's not impressive to use big words

• 1:27Ryan Holiday?

  or complicated sentences that go over the reader's heads. In fact, it's a failure. But two, it's a reminder to us as readers, there's nothing impressive about grunting our way through this bad writing. Life is short. We can quit bad books. We can spend our time and money on writers who respect their audience and who know how to communicate effectively. To the Stoics, it wasn't "that we read", it's "what we read", and we should seek out books that make a difference in our lives, not the ones that win prizes or impress people. What matters is what we think of the books, not what others think. What's impressive is what we get out of them, not how they look on our shelves or how they might impress certain types of company. So read widely, read aggressively, but don't be a glutton for punishment.

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  And look, I think every great reader has a reading practice, a set of rules, a way of thinking about books that makes them a better reader. They don't just read what everyone else is reading, because as the quote goes, then they'll only think the things that other people are thinking. That's what we built the Read to Lead Challenge around. It's also based on that quote from Truman about how not all readers are leaders, but all leaders have to be readers. And this course has been taken by over 10,000 people now. We just wrapped up our first live cohort of it in June, which exceeded our expectations. So we're making it widely available to all the people who missed that. And you get all the interviews that they missed. So now you get hours and hours of Q and As, of deep dives into these

• 2:56Ryan Holiday?

  topics, plus a bunch of other awesome stuff. It's two emails a week for five weeks, plus some other really cool stuff. You can sign up at dailystoic.com/readtolead, or you can check it out at store.dailystoic.com, under the Courses tab. I hope you check this out. And if you're thinking about joining Daily Stoic Life, now is a good time to do that, because you get this course and all our other courses for free. If you join, you can sign up there at dailystoiclife.com.

• 3:28Ryan Holiday?

  Judge yourself, not others. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living, by yours truly and my co-writer and translator, Stephen Hanselman. I actually do this journal every single day. There's a question in the morning, a question in the afternoon, then there's these sort of weekly meditations. As Epictetus says, "Every day and night, we keep thoughts like this at hand. Write them, read them aloud, and talk to yourself and others about them." You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal anywhere books are sold, and also get a signed, personalized copy from me in the Daily Stoic store at store.dailystoic.com. There is nothing less philosophical than being a know-it-all.

• 4:12Ryan Holiday?

  This is especially true of those who use their knowledge to scold others for their mistakes while claiming the superiority of their knowledge or insight. The Stoics taught that behaving this way was to miss the entire purpose of philosophy as a tool for self-correction, medicine for our own souls, not a weapon for putting down others. Seneca's letters twice employ the metaphor of scrubbing down or scraping off our faults. "We need to see ourselves as in the care of philosophy's principles," he says, or, as Epictetus put it later, when referring to the philosopher's lecture hall, "we need to see it as a hospital for our own therapy." So try not to write down a single complaint or problem of another person in your journal this week.

• 4:57Ryan Holiday?

  Focus on what ails you. We have two quotes from Seneca's moral letters and one from the discourses. "When philosophy is wielded with arrogance and stubbornly, it is the cause for the ruin of many. Let philosophy scrape off your own faults rather than be a way to rail against the faults of others." That's Seneca, letter 103. "Some people with exceptional minds quickly grasp virtue or produce it within themselves, but other dim and lazy types hindered by bad habits must have their rusty souls constantly scrubbed down. The weaker sorts will be helped and lifted from their bad opinions if we put them in the care of philosophy's principles." That's Epictetus's Moral Letters 95. And then Epictetus's Discourses 323.

• 5:40Ryan Holiday?

  "Men, the philosopher's lecture hall is a hospital. You shouldn't walk out of it feeling pleasure but pain, for you weren't well when you entered it." I think this is the tension here, and I've seen it. Some people maybe get it wrong, probably in bad faith, when they reply to stuff I've posted or written. Who are you to criticize, I don't know, anti-vaxxers? Or who are you to say that have this political opinion? Or to say that this is right or wrong? You're not perfect. Of course, right? Of course, I'm not perfect. Of course, a Stoic is primarily focused on their own edification, their own improvement. They're trying to look in the mirror. They're trying to scrub off their own faults.

• 6:24Ryan Holiday?

  That doesn't mean that we turn a blind eye to what's happening in the world. That doesn't mean we indulge and accept and encourage ridiculousness or injustices by other people. I mean, some of the best Stoic lines are quips or criticisms of other people, right? The Stoics were also teachers. Zeno, Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, they were writers and thinkers. They were responsible for teaching philosophy to people. Of course, we have to make judgments. I think what the Stoics are really talking about is not being a Monday morning quarterback at the expense of your performance on Sunday, right? When I study history, obviously, part of my job is to make judgments

• 7:09Ryan Holiday?

  and communicate these ideas to you and to people and to myself. And that really is what I'm doing. And I have a chapter in Courage is Calling about why we don't judge another person's courage, right? We don't fully understand everything that's going on with them. But in another sense, we do judge their courage. But instead of criticizing them, instead of feeling better than them because they made this mistake, we try to look at them as cautionary tales, almost like we would in a Greek tragedy or a Roman play, a Shakespearean play, and try to apply those lessons to our own lives. So the point is, when you see someone else doing something wrong, when you see something you don't like, when you see someone debasing themselves, when you see someone advocating a preposterous or dangerous opinion,

• 7:53Ryan Holiday?

  you can criticize it, you can call it out for what it is. But don't feel superior for it. Try to learn from it. Try to apply lessons from that to your own life. That's the journey that we're on here. Obviously, as a writer and a speaker, I have to draw on examples. My work would be not very compelling if I didn't do that. So I have to walk a slightly different razor's edge. And, I mean, look, that's what's so funny, right? The Stoics are saying, don't criticize other people. And yet, even in this quote from Seneca, Moro Letters 95, he's saying, "Look, some people get this naturally, but there are other dim and lazy types hindered by bad habits, and they must have their rusty souls constantly scrubbed."

• 8:38Ryan Holiday?

  So that does exist, right? And somebody has to do that job. And perhaps that's your job with a friend or a family member. Just remember that your real job is scrubbing down your own rusty soul. And if you ever think that it is not rusty, well, that is a compelling sign right there that it is. Just a funny note, I get this all the time because of ego is the enemy. People go, what do I do about my boss's ego? What do you do about all the egos in our organization? Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. But much less often do I get the question, I have an ego. What do I do about my ego? Right? The question we often are gravitating towards solving other people's issues, focusing on other people's flaws.

• 9:21Ryan Holiday?

  But as they say in the Bible, don't worry about the splinter in your neighbor's eye when you have a log in your own. So that's what philosophy is about. You are not well. Treat yourself first. But of course, you may recognize similar symptoms in other people. If you need to point them out, go right ahead.

• 9:53Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the Stoics in real life met at what was called the Stoa, the Stoa Pochyle, the Painted Porch in ancient Athens. Obviously, we can't all get together in one place because this community is like hundreds of thousands of people and we couldn't fit in one space. But we have made a special digital version of the Stoa. We're calling it Daily Stoic Life. It's an awesome community. You could talk about like today's episode, you could talk about the emails, ask questions. That's one of my favorite parts is interacting with all these people who are using Stoicism to be better in their actual, real lives. You get more Daily Stoic Meditations over the weekend, just for the Daily Stoic Life members, quarterly Q and As with me, cloth-bound edition of our Best of Meditations, plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including discounts.

• 10:36Ryan Holiday?

  And this is the best part, all our Daily Stoic Courses and Challenges totally for free, hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge. We'd love to have you join us. There's a two-week trial totally for free. Check it out at dailystoiclife.com.

• 11:09Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you.